The Garden History Blog

The Gardens Trust is working towards  publishing a book on Unforgettable Gardens and together with a few colleagues I’ve recently spent ages trying to decide which ones to include and why.  Our debates reminded me of a similar dilemma which must have been faced by Vita Sackville-West when she was writing English Country Houses in the middle of the Second World War. Published in 1941 it had the aim   of boosting national pride and morale and reads a little like a love letter to the stately, and even more, the not-so-stately homes of England.

Read on to see which houses and gardens she eventually included – or omitted – and why.

Newstead Abbey, by Varley, 1825

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The Casa Del Rey Moro, Ronda before recent restoration

This could be  a fairy tale story. A dashing young American millionaire buys a Moorish castle in a breathtaking position, from an ancient aristocratic Spanish family promising to restore it.

Imagine the excitement when he announces he has found hidden treasures which will make it second only to the Alhambra Palace in historical importance.  He engages 70 workmen to begin  digging up under the floors and the courtyard garden and  discovers vaults he says date back to Roman times, containing not only mosaics but Roman, Moorish and Gothic gold coins and other precious objects, and believes he has discovered the untouched tombs of Moorish kings.

So why haven’t you heard of it? What happened to this potential second Alhambra?  Did something go wrong?

In part the story is enough to make you laugh – or maybe cry – but , despite that, I’m still writing about the house and garden he bought.

Read on to find out what happened and why its definitely worth visiting…

In the gardens of the Casa del Rey Moro in Ronda

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A Linnet on a Spray of Barberry, by Le Moyne,  Sothebys

This was supposed to be a really  easy post to write because there are lots of nice pictures and, I thought, a reasonably straightforward story to tell.  But it’s been anything but!    It follows  on from last week’s post and looks at an artist whose early work was thought to contain some of the earliest images of the New World seen through European eyes.

French by birth Jacques Le Moyne fled to London in one of waves of Huguenot refugees escaping from religious persecution in Europe  becoming a naturalised Englishman before dying in 1588.

Clove pinks and a small tortoiseshell butterfly, undated. Sothebys

Although little is known of his life it’s clear he was also an extremely talented botanical artist and a pioneering figure in the history of florilegia. In the words of a recent British Museum exhibition he “created remarkable watercolours of plants, flowers, fruit and vegetables which captivate the eye with their extraordinary naturalism and the striking simplicity of their presentation.”

In the end, however, Le Moyne proved much more elusive than expected  especially as earlier this week when  I was finishing this post   I discovered completely new research, published just a few weeks ago, which made me  rewrite a large part of it!

From a florilegium in the British Museum, c1585

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Ferdinand of Spain watching Columbus land in the Indies , from Guliano Dati’s Lettera, 1493

One part of garden history as a discipline that sometimes gets overlooked is the history of landscape in its widest sense, so today  I’m turning my attention to the way that Europeans saw and recorded new landscapes when they started exploring the rest of the world.

We know that early adventurers such as Columbus  were fascinated by plants, animals, the natural resources and the people of the so-called New Worlds.  They collected them & transported them home and distributed them  widely but surprisingly they appear to have taken very little interest  in the landscapes of the places they visited, or if they did,  seem to have done  very little to record or represent it pictorially.    

Why ever not?

Terra Bimene – thought to be Florida from the Miller Atlas, 1519

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From The Poetical Works of Erasmus Darwin, 1806 edition, shoeing some of Linnaeus’s 

Towards the end of the 18thc botany had become  a fashionable subject amongst the educated class in Britain, and in particular it was thought the study of plants was a suitably feminine pastime. So when Erasmus Darwin  (who I wrote about last week] decided to try and popularise Linnaeus’s new system of plant classification he had a big problem.  Linnaeus claimed that plants had sex,  so how could Darwin explain that without shocking his readership? Believe it or not he decided to do it in verse.

What followed was  a 4,000 line poem about the sex-life of plants with racy [for the time] language and imagery which made him the most famous poet of his day. Written in two parts  The Loves of the Plants [1789] and The Economy of Vegetation it was then republished in 1791 as The Botanic Garden.   

But there’s more to it than just plants ….

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